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IBRD and IDA: Working for a World Free of Poverty.enMaking International Women's Day Counthttp://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/making-international-womens-day-count
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A question dominated discussions ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2014/mar/03/open-thread-international-womens-day-count?commentpage=1" rel="nofollow" style="line-height: 1.6em;">How can we make it count?</a><br />
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Gender equality and empowerment are principles that have been widely adopted for some time; but for many women, particularly those in developing countries, action lags way behind the rhetoric. The same is true in business: Evidence abounds for <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shq4XbCPuVM&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">the business case for investing in women</a>, but the reality remains that for a lot of women, things at work haven’t progressed much beyond what their mothers experienced.<br />
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It makes sense then that the issues that came up time and again during a panel I participated in at <a href="http://weprinciples.org/Site/MediaInformation/" rel="nofollow">the sixth annual meeting of the UN's Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs) </a>&nbsp;titled “Jobs, Gender and Development: Confronting the Global Challenge," mainly related to the enduring challenges women face at work. I had gone there thinking I had much to add to <em>that</em> topic, but I came away having learned more than I could share, about topics I hadn’t expected.</p>
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I had planned to talk about the “world out there” and the improvements we help our clients achieve. I wanted to touch on the issue of getting more financing to women entrepreneurs (<a href="http://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/Industry_EXT_Content/IFC_External_Corporate_Site/Industries/Financial+Markets/MSME+Finance/Banking+on+Women/" rel="nofollow">the $300 billion credit gap</a> identified by McKinsey) and IFC’s practical experience working with clients to apply a gender prism to their workplaces to access more talent, improve attendance, and retain female workers. I had gone in thinking to share insights from a global perspective, but I was reminded that the conversation has to start at home—that it must be about our own organizations and how we choose to manage gender-related concerns.<br />
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Participants wanted to understand more deeply why women get overlooked for promotion, why some organizations still tolerate male-only selection panels, and why taking maternity leave still means almost certain demotion for most women. The key question for panelists like me was: <em>If the evidence for a business case for investing in women is there, then why is gender inclusion proving so difficult</em>?<br />
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The answer gets labeled today as <em>biased social norms</em>.<br />
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Panelist Nathalie Malige, CEO of <a href="http://www.diverseo.com/" rel="nofollow">Diverseo</a>, a firm of “Cognitive Bias Advisors,” told us about breakthroughs in “mind sciences” and their emerging role in business performance. If you've read Daniel Kahneman's excellent <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555" rel="nofollow"><em>Thinking, Fast and Slow</em></a>, you'll recognize the approach. If you haven’t, know that the author performed psychological and economic research into how people make decisions or come to conclusions—which are informed by the kinds of prejudices and cultural baggage we bring to our choices.<br />
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Stephen Fitzgerald, also a panelist whose topic was “Breaking Stereotypes, Expanding Opportunities,” serves on the Board of Guardians the Future Fund, an Australian sovereign wealth fund. He explained how Australia has established a <a href="https://www.humanrights.gov.au/male-champions-change" rel="nofollow">Male Champions of Change</a>, which is focused on practical steps to dismantle gender-based barriers in members’ own organizations and more broadly. Fitzgerald talked about "disrupting the status quo," while keeping focused on the prize that will follow from the full participation of women in Australia’s economy: an estimated 11% uplift in Australia's GDP. &nbsp;Male Champions of Change also includes the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chief of the Army, David Morrison. (By the way, Morrison's video about <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqpoeVgr8U" rel="nofollow">what is acceptable behavior within the Australian army</a> has had more than a million hits on YouTube; if you take three minutes to watch it, you'll understand why.)<br />
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<a href="http://weprinciples.org/Site/WepsLeadershipAwards/" rel="nofollow">WEP Leadership Award</a> winner Joe Keefe, President and Chief Executive Officer of <a href="http://www.paxworld.com/" rel="nofollow">Pax</a> World Management and Pax World Funds–which support the full integration of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors into investment analysis and decision making—asserted that gender inequality is "the defining civil rights issue of our time," and that "by advancing the business case, we can advance the moral case."<br />
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Finally, speaking from the audience, Idil Turkmenoglu—head of HR for Turkey-based <a href="http://www.halklailiskiler.com/" rel="nofollow">Halkla Iliskiler</a>—urged us all: "Just start with a simple, big idea and all the steps will follow."<br />
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So as we celebrate International Women's Day, the big, simple idea for my employer, IFC, should be: keep working with our clients on addressing gender-based constraints in their workplaces, but let's make sure we are just as systematic in addressing them in our own.</p>
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Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:54:00 -0400Nigel TwoseMore, Better Jobshttp://blogs.worldbank.org/psd/more-better-jobs
<p><img src="/psd/files/psd/jobs.jpeg" alt="" align="middle" height="300" width="450"></p><p>Like every other development institution, The World Bank Group's <a href="http://www1.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/corp_ext_content/ifc_external_corporate_site/home">International Finance Corporation</a> (IFC) is deeply concerned with how to create more and better jobs. There’s no question that jobs are the key issue in any discussion about ending poverty.&nbsp; The 60,000 poor people who participated in Deepa Narayan's Voices of the Poor study 13 years ago were right—jobs are the surest way out of poverty for people across the world.<br><br>Today, IFC publishes a report on the findings of a study about how <a href="http://www.ifc.org/jobcreation">jobs</a> are created by the private sector.&nbsp; Given the private sector provides 90 per cent of jobs, the estimated 600 million that&nbsp;&nbsp; need to be created by 2020 will inevitably have to come from the private sector.<!--break-->Our report looks at the constraints that stop companies from creating jobs, and thus gives a sense of where IFC and others with IFC have to focus, if we are serious about making more of a dent on current unemployment figures and also, just as importantly, creating the millions of good quality jobs that will be needed for the young people who are entering the labor market.<br><br>It’s important to state upfront that IFC is not a research institution, and so our intention in carrying out the study is very much about how we can implement what we learn in our strategy and operations.<br><br>So what’s particularly striking?&nbsp; Here’s my own, personal take:</p><p>1)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The firm size issue-- IFC gets lots of pressure to work with <a href="http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/sme.nsf/Content/Access_to_Finance">SMEs</a>; but if&nbsp; our overriding goal is poverty eradication, the report suggests we should focus on larger firms (they’re more productive, pay higher wages, create more and better jobs). At the same time, we need to help address the SME ‘stunted growth’ problem by tackling the obstacles preventing good SMEs from growing.&nbsp; And then, yes, continue to support SMEs through Financial Intermediaries.</p><p>2)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Our focus on the number of direct jobs created by our clients is misleading. Far more jobs are indirect, meaning they get created in supply chains and distribution channels.&nbsp; This suggests we should focus much more systematically on how to strengthen these channels through our investments and advice.&nbsp; There’s one case study&nbsp; on multipliers I thought was fascinating – in a mine in Ghana, 28 jobs were created in the surrounding economy for each job created in the mine itself.</p><p>3) &nbsp;&nbsp; Training and skills are vital.&nbsp; 45 million people enter the work force each year, but more than a third of companies studied across the globe were unable to find employees with the skills they needed. Our current approach is investments in education providers&nbsp; and&nbsp; on-the-job training support, but it is a tiny amount of IFC's work.&nbsp; This gives support to our MAS colleagues who want a more ambitious strategy on this, and a scale up of management attention.</p><p>4) &nbsp;&nbsp; The nature of the jobs challenge varies by region and country. The unemployment rate is highest in MENA (10%), more than double EAP and South Asia.&nbsp; Youth unemployment is also highest in MENA; vulnerable employment and working poor are the major challenges in South Asia and Africa.&nbsp; This suggests we should consider a ‘jobs lens’ systematically applied in every operational strategy.&nbsp; We have a high priority to design and test that tool, and also to put in place an implementation support team that can work with operational departments as they think through ways to strengthen their tailored jobs strategy.</p><p>5) &nbsp;&nbsp; Finally, it’s important to note that not all jobs are created equal.&nbsp; Jobs that don't meet environment and social standards have lower development impact, even negative development impact. <br><br>My job is to oversee IFC’s results measurement system and to help tease out the lessons for our work going forward.&nbsp; We have a robust standardized system of measuring inputs, outputs and outcomes but, if we are honest with ourselves, it’s still a struggle to fully understand the sustained impact of our work.&nbsp; <br><br>As we launch the jobs study, I’m wondering if jobs might be the best proxy indicator of impact for IFC.&nbsp; Should we put job creation center stage in our strategy?&nbsp; What would that mean? It certainly doesn’t mean we should try to count the total number of jobs IFC has created, which both internal and external experts have warned us against; nor does it mean setting ourselves a numerical target for job creation.<br><br>And how could we align this with our clients’ interests?&nbsp; A successful firm is looking to maximize profits rather than the number of jobs it provides: can we see how to successfully link these two perspectives? How many of our clients are interested in the job creation effects of their business, and why? If we can understand this better, it might give us the key to the way forward.<br><br>I’d be interested in your thoughts.<br><br><br><br>&nbsp;</p>Mon, 14 Jan 2013 09:55:22 -0500Nigel TwoseOld School or New School, the Question is the Same: How can development institutions make measurement core to their business? http://blogs.worldbank.org/psd/old-school-or-new-school-the-question-is-the-same-how-can-development-institutions-make-measurement
<P>Firms maximize their profits by developing strategy with targets, tracking progress, and using incentives to drive achievement. Without the natural feedback of the market, how can we use this approach to drive toward results for the poor?&nbsp; <BR><BR>One of us works for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – an old school Bretton Woods institution with years of experience building systems to track results across countries. The other one of us works for the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, an entrepreneurial organization that is much newer on the block, without some of the systems that come with fifty years of development work but also without the preconceptions. We come to the table with a desire to learn from each other’s experience. We hope this first blog will pique input from colleagues around the world, similarly passionate about the power of data to improve our business.</P>
<P><!--break-->Our main concern is how to make relevant, credible, transparent and actionable measurement the powerful tool it needs to be in our organizations. We are convinced that private sector practices that link strategy, results, information and performance incentives hold promise, but also aware that there exist significant challenges to successfully using them. In our two very different institutions, we grapple with three similar questions about how to resolve this tension.&nbsp; <BR><BR><STRONG>Question #1: How do we ensure data about results are used to increase effectiveness?</STRONG></P>
<P>There is no doubt that the last 5-10 years have witnessed enormous progress in the understanding and practice of evaluating development effectiveness. Although there remains philosophical debate about how evaluation is best done, we believe that the simple fact that it is supported at the highest levels of institutions such as DFID, USAID and the World Bank, debated among practitioners and academics, funded and pursued passionately indicates progress. <BR><BR>The problem is that the current discourse about evaluation theory and design doesn’t touch on the more daunting challenge of how to integrate measurement into decision making. Simply put, the most elegant evaluation design is irrelevant if the findings are never used. In this way, the true “gold standard” is the use of data rather than a specific way to collect it. Moreover, in both of our organizations, impact evaluation produces a small portion of the type of regular information people need to track progress and make decisions. High level strategies to alleviate poverty through business growth, farmer productivity, access to financial services and other means are built on diverse types of investments, grants, organizations, partnerships and contexts and therefore diverse types of information. Technically, we know how hard it is to “sum up” results data of varying quality and to track them as indicators on management scorecards and dashboards. Still, the real institutional need is to find a way to do exactly this: provide decision makers responsible for allocating resources with digestible information that they use. We find very little in the current debates and policy discussions to help us to chart a course to do this.&nbsp; <BR><BR><STRONG>Question #2: How can we use incentives to drive results and use of data?</STRONG></P>
<P>Results-based approaches have been in and out of development for a while. Bilateral donors turned to tougher contractual tools as a means to buy and ensure outcomes from implementing partners some ten years back. Performance-based incentives (PBI) or pay-for-performance (P4P) is showing up today in discussions on development financing. DFID has adopted such an approach to allocate its aid budget. The Results Based Financing for Health (RBF) effort of the World Bank, Norwegian government and DFID seeks to use results-based financing to improve healthcare in developing countries.&nbsp; <BR><BR>Despite these and other efforts to incentivize changed behavior among NGOs, governments and others, we don’t use performance-based incentives in our own organizations. Experience working in development reminds us how difficult it is to control for complexity. We understand, too, that measuring change is not the same as being able to attribute it to individual action and that it is hard to be held accountable for something that is both complex and beyond our control. Nevertheless, we wonder if we’ve disregarded too quickly lessons of professional accountability from the private sector. Private sector leaders are held accountable to increased revenue and sales despite their lack of direct control. If we are willing to hold our grantees, partners and national service providers up to this test, can we also hold ourselves accountable for targeting results, measuring progress and using the data to become increasingly effective? <BR><BR><STRONG>Question #3: How can we assure that the “client” is center stage in our efforts to plan for and measure results?</STRONG></P>
<P>Aspirations to assure that the people on the receiving end of development are central to its planning and measurement are not new. The arguments supporting participatory development date back to the 1970s and even the most mainstream institutions adopted its tenets in the 1990s. And yet, by the beginning of the century, twenty years of practice were characterized as an emperor with no clothes – the feared “New Tyranny” of orthodoxy without enough proof of the value added (<A href="http://www.amazon.com/Participation-New-Tyranny-Bill-Cooke/dp/1856497941/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1313761565&amp;sr=1-1" target=_blank>Participation: The New Tyranny?</A> by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, 2001). It’s no surprise that the pendulum has swung to the opposite pole today – rigorous positivist evaluation design as the sole focus of our dialogue and efforts to solve the broader measurement challenges we still face.<BR>&nbsp; <BR>Although we applaud the emphasis on scientific methods, we lament the faddism of evaluation practice and the fact that we aren’t all focused on a more diverse set of problems to solve. People, communities and grantee and partner organizations remain essential to all of our efforts. Esther Duflo and Abijhit Banerjee’s recent book <EM>Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty</EM> pushes us to see the connection between individuals and our efforts to help them, but how do we apply this kind of thinking to fit the scale and scope of high level strategies designed and implemented by large donor organizations? Foundations survey their grantees and IFC surveys its clients to assess the quality of their relationships. But how do we connect the dots between what we learn and how we do and improve our work in a way that avoids the mistakes of participatory and experimental fads?</P>
<P>We could go on and on to list and pose the questions that motivate our 1:1 conversations of late. Please join us – we’d love to broaden the conversation and hear your ideas.</P>Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:59:32 -0400Nigel Twose